Book Image

Learning HBase

By : Shashwat Shriparv
Book Image

Learning HBase

By: Shashwat Shriparv

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning HBase
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding HBase components in detail


To understand the components of HBase, let's start from the bottom, from HFile to RegionServers, and then progress towards the master. There can be one to n RegionServers, one to n DataNodes, and one to n ZooKeeper nodes. Refer to the following figure:

HFile

HFile is designed after Google SSTable, which is a reinterpretation of Google's implementation based on their Bigtable paper. It was implemented after HBase v0.20.0; earlier, an alternate file format, that is, MapFile was being temporarily used. An HFile internally consists of HFile blocks that are its building blocks.

Note

Go through the links https://hbase.apache.org/book/apes03.html and https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-3857, and also go through the PDF files present on the previous link for an actual file representation of HFile on the disk.

Region

Regions are the basic blocks of RegionServers that provide distribution, availability, and storage for columns and column families on an HBase...